Many years after the generation of Jacob’s twelve sons, the Israelite people are multiplying like rabbits in Egypt. Oh, they’re Israelites now because they are all descended from Israel, God’s new name for Jacob. Everyone still knows which of Jacob’s sons they’re descended from though so the tribes are distinctly formed.
A new pharaoh has come to power, somehow without knowing anything about Joseph or what he did. All he knows is that there’s a big group of people out towards the border who refuse to integrate into Egyptian society and that poses a major threat to national security. Being a reasonable, rational ruler, his first instinct was to conquer all of the Israelites and hold them in brutal slavery to thin them out some. This pharaoh didn’t take into account though, when he took away all the Israelites’’ possessions and freedoms that there still was and always would be one free, universal form of entertainment through all the world through all of history. The Israelites seemed to be multiplying even faster now.
In a little bit of a panic, Pharaoh ordered some Hebrew midwives to start killing baby boys, and only allowing Israelite girls to live, which, by the way, is a terrible way to thin out a population anyway. They summarily ignored that order and fed Pharaoh a line about how Israelite women have babies too fast and they can’t get to them in time. Pharaoh then ordered all the people of Egypt to just start throwing baby Israelite boys into the Nile. Remember now, these are the measures Pharaoh is taking to prevent the Israelites from rising up against him. Brilliant.
A Levite woman tricks an Egyptian princess into adopting her son Moses, so he avoids being thrown in the river and gets to live in the palace once he’s old enough to leave his mother. His time there is cut short though when he ventures out one day and sees a slave-driver beating an Israelite. Moses looks around and doesn’t see anyone so he murders the slave-driver and buries him in the sand. He thinks he was pretty sneaky, but he talks to some Israelite men later and realizes that he’s an idiot and everyone knows about what he did. He freaks out and runs away, which turns out to be pretty prescient because Pharaoh wants to arrest him and then kill him soon after.
Moses escapes to Midian, which most people seem to agree is right around the western-most point of Saudi Arabia. There, he helped out some sisters trying to water their sheep at a well and was taken in by their father, a priest of Midian. He married one of the girls and integrated himself into the nomadic little Midianite camp, but one day he came across a bush that was on fire, but not consumed by the flames. When he got close to it God spoke to him and identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It sounds like God had kind of faded away for the last few decades because Moses says that no one will believe he spoke to Him and mentions that everyone worships many gods now. God tells him not to worry so much and to go back to Egypt and tell the Pharaoh that He had commanded that all the Israelites needed to go out into the desert for three days to offer sacrifices and praise to God. This was going to be a lie that Moses was to deliver. Then he was supposed to round up all the Israelites and run away. Even though it seemed like kind of a flimsy plan at a glance, to promise Pharoah that they’d be right back and then make a break for it once he wasn’t looking, God assured Moses that He would back him up and everything would work out.
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